Coilgun

Because it is the future and I don’t seem to have a flying car or jetpack yet I’ve decided to go ahead and make myself the next best thing. An energy weapon.

In pursuit of this I’ve decided to make myself a coilgun. Also known as a Gauss gun/rifle. The concept is simple. You make a coil around a barrel and pass a very large amount of voltage through it for a very short time. This causes the coil the briefly become a very strong magnet. Near the short end of the barrel you have a rather solid metal slug. When the coil goes magnetic it tries to pull the slug into it’s center via flux-linkage.

However if all goes well by the time the slug reaches the center the coil is off and the magnetic filed is gone and the slug happily sails out the pointy end of the barrel.

The plan is to make a prototype baby one and then build a desk sized multi-coil device that should hurl steel death at a significant speed. wooo.

UPDATE: I finished the prototype today. I hand wound the coil (4cm long, 13 layers) and used the charging circuit/capacitor from a disposable camera. Results weren’t great but I’m pretty sure it’s just due to the wussy capacitor in the camera. I’m trying to source some decent caps then will try again. See the gallery below for build pics. The rubber gloves were because we weren’t confident of no shorts. So we were playing it safe.